The regional board that decides which road projects get built in greater Charlotte voted Wednesday night, May 20, to withdraw its support for the I-77 South toll lanes — all but ending a $3.2 billion expansion and clearing it off the state's ten-year construction plan.
The vote by the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization, the body known as CRTPO, came nine days after the Charlotte City Council moved to pull the city's own support, and it puts an estimated $700 million in state money on a path out of the region. A supermajority of the board's weighted membership voted to rescind. No roll-call tally was released.
What the vote actually does
The immediate effect is administrative and severe: the project comes off the North Carolina Department of Transportation's State Transportation Improvement Program — the STIP, the ten-year list of funded projects. A road that is not on the STIP is not getting built. The eleven-mile toll expansion, which would have run from just north of Uptown to the South Carolina line, no longer has a place in the state's funded pipeline.
The money follows the project. In a May 15 letter to Mayor Vi Lyles, N.C. Transportation Secretary Daniel Johnson warned that rejecting the toll plan would cost the region $700 million — $600 million in statewide mobility funding and a $100 million tolling "bonus allocation" — and that the money would be redistributed elsewhere in the state. After the vote, NCDOT confirmed what it called "the loss of $700 million in critical transportation funding," while adding that it "remain committed to delivering projects that local governments and planners ask us to deliver."
How it got here
The reversal moved fast. On May 11 the City Council took the votes that started it — a near-unanimous resolution against the toll plan and a separate, narrower motion on the city's 2024 approval that the Mercury covered in detail. (The "6-5 to rescind" line repeated in wire coverage conflates those two votes; the council's actual actions were more specific than that shorthand.) Nine days later, CRTPO made the city's position regional.
Sustain Charlotte, the advocacy group that opposed the toll lanes, said every municipality in Mecklenburg County joined the city and the county in voting to rescind — a characterization the board did not dispute but did not publish as a vote-by-vote roll.
What replaces it
Nothing yet — and that is the part no one has answered. NCDOT said it hopes Charlotte and CRTPO "can work together to find a path forward to deliver relief to the I-77 corridor." What that path is remains open. The advocates who helped end the toll plan are floating non-tolled alternatives — bus-on-shoulder service, micro-transit, and reversible non-tolled HOV lanes among them — pushed by figures including Sustain Charlotte's Shannon Binns and Matthews Mayor John Higdon. None of those is funded. None is on the STIP. The congestion the toll lanes were meant to address is unchanged.
There is also a clock the vote does not stop. Mayor Lyles is leaving office — she has said she will resign June 30 — and the question of what follows the toll lanes will land on whoever succeeds her, in the middle of a mayoral race.
The relationship that's left
The state did not hide its displeasure, and the more durable cost of the week may be the one that does not show up on the STIP. Charlotte and Raleigh now have to build a replacement for one of the region's worst chokepoints together, immediately after the region handed the state a $700 million rejection. NCDOT says it is still willing. The next move belongs to a city government that is, for the moment, between mayors.